Qaiser Ahmed Sheikh (Federal Minister for Maritime Affairs): Upgrading Pakistan's Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating to 'CCC+' from 'CCC' by Fitch is a message for the world that Pakistan’s economy is getting better and investment risk is reducing. There are many international institutions that are getting interest in investment in Pakistan. Like we are going to sign an MoU with Maersk Line, a biggest shipping company based in Europe. Saudi and Chinese companies have been already investing in Pakistan but now European companies are also investing here.

The 2.5 percent reduction in the policy rate in last two months have reduced the interest rate to 12 percent. In the month of July, inflation came down to 11 percent which was 38 percent last year. In the leadership of Mian Shahbaz Sharif, the government is fully determined to bring betterment in the economy of the country and we are working day and night to achieve that.

It has been observed that many countries of the world are taking interest in our sea ports mainly due to the access to central Asian markets from here. If big vessels of 20000 containers capacity arrive here, like recently one did, then the cost of freight will also reduce and people will benefit from it. It is expected that $2 billion investment will come from Europe through these ports. Last week, we visited European terminals to see what could be done to bring more improvements in our terminals, how we can raise the value of commodities of import and export and how we can launch feeder vessels between nearby countries.

In the next 5 years, we will grow our exports to 60 billion dollars. This year our exports increased to 3 billion dollars from 27 billion to 30 billion dollars as compared to last year while our imports reduced to 23 billion dollars from 80 billion dollars to 57 billion dollars. So, despite the reducing imports, we are increasing our exports. The gap between imports and exports two years ago was 50 billion dollar which is now 26 billion dollars. We are now going towards export led growth and we are establishing industrial zones through the relocation of Chinese industries which will help us in this regard.

We are seeing increase in the exports of agricultural products for which we have a huge capacity and our IT exports also increased but we could not improve our textile because of international competition. We are determined to increase our value-added exports by creating industries based on value-added growth.